Saturday, July 7, 2018

I take a lot of meetings with young people wanting to be data scientists..

The meetings generally have this feel:

Hi, I have interest in becoming a data scientist and I want to get your perspective on what that might take, let's meet for coffee.

The interns that setup these meetings come from a wide range of backgrounds and skill levels. Many times they are interested in which classes they should take to be competitive for data science roles after they graduate. I thought it would be helpful to put the advice I give them into a blog post so more people can read it.

I reviewed the current course offerings at a few schools, and settled on a list of 14 basic classes (and some electives at the end) that I think should be part of every data science curriculum. Here is my list:

MATH

Calculus I, II, III

Differential Equations

Linear Algebra

Some data scientists say you can skimp on these requirements, but that's universally false. If you don't understand matrix algebra or differentials you simply can't understand the algorithms we implement. The data scientists I see who struggle with higher level math fail in understanding the operations of complex algorithms, which leads to failure in implementation.

STATISTICS

Intro to Stats

Calculus Based Stats

Generalized Research Method Class

Econometrics

Although many modern data science algorithms are not based purely in statistics, the concepts of risk, certainty, and confidence in these classes are key to understanding predictive modeling in general. Having worked with computer science only focused data scientists, I now see a background in stats as key to the fundamentals of making predictions.

Econometrics may seem like an outlier, but there are concepts of predictive modeling such as time-series analysis, dealing with collinearity, endogeneity and auto correlation which are best taught in the context of econometrics.

COMPUTER SCIENCE

Programming I, II

Data Structures

Fundamentals of Computer Algorithms

Introduction to Database Systems

Sometimes I question the value of formal education in coding, some of the best programmers I know have degrees in non-computer fields. That said, computer science is still a core skillset for data scientists, and is required knowledge to be hired by someone like me (if you have the skills from another source that's great, just figure out a way to demonstrate it with an application/in an interview).

ELECTIVES

As for electives in the data science space, these should be modeled towards what specifically you want to do.

If you want to go into business, take classes in economics, business operations, and accounting.

If you want to go into algorithm development, focus more time in advanced computer science classes.

If you want to go into academic research, focus on whichever academic discipline you are most interested in.

CONCLUSION

This is intended to be a reasonable list of classes for young people interested in data science. It serves two purposes really:

Provide a framework for undergrads looking to become a data scientist.

Prevent me from saying things I later regret when confronted by students who want to be data scientists without taking math.

Sunday, March 4, 2018

For the most part the R statistical system is a robust and fast way to quickly execute statistical analyses. Other times the annoyances and "tricks" it contains for more junior analysts on the system, leads me to encourage new analysts to opt for Python instead.

One of the biggest tricks inside of R for junior analysts involves a specific data type called "factors," attempted type conversion, and a sometimes difficult to detect programming issue.

WHAT ARE FACTORS

Factors are a data type specific to R that helps statistician deal with categorical data. In CS terms, factors help statisticians deal with non-numeric low-cardinality variables. In most statistical processes this type of variable will be converted to binary dummies, so their storage in situ is less important.

What does this actually mean? When storing a factor, R strips out all of the actual text and replaces it with index numbers correlated to the textual values and stores the index numbers instead. This both saves space in data frame storage and logically makes sense in the way these are used by statisticians.

And this process is mostly invisible to user for *most* processes...

That is, until you try to convert a factor to something else.

HOW DOES THE PROBLEM START?

This system works fine, until you need to convert that data to something else. And here's the key instance where I've seen that occur: Let's say that you're importing some data that you're not entirely familiar with, So you run something like this to import and inspect your data:

We see a data frame with 3 columns "x" appears to be an index, "b" is just a simple numeric field. But "a" is weird. It looks like numbers, but for some reason R thought it was a factor. This is where the mistake starts:

Junior analyst converts this value directly to number (as.numeric() which works in many other programming languages and the SQL that is often use by data scientists.)-and continues on with their day.

Three hours later the junior analyst (who may be a bit unfamiliar with the business problem to be solved) turns in a work product that has completely bizarre results and is confusing to the business-they must be wrong. So what happened?

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED

Let's split the process apart and see what actually happens when you as.numeric() a factor.
If we create a new column in our data set containing the type-converted data we see:

Wait.. what? This now seems to be *correlated* to but with completely different values than our original column. Here's the trick:

'When factors are converted to numeric using as.numeric() it pulls the underlying index numbers and not the actual values, even if that actual value appears to be a number.'

Essentially: Even though column 'a' looks like numbers, R ignores that and pulls an internal ID number R uses as backend lookup. This can be deceptive, especially when your level of missingness is relatively low after the type conversion. Confusing this a bit, is that expected correlations generally hold up after the conversion, because the index numbers are ordered-it's simply the magnitude + variance that changes.

FIXING THE PROBLEM

Fixing the problem is easy, you simply convert to character (as.character()) before converting to numeric. This conversion uses the actual data values, gets rid of our index numbers. But what if you want to know why your variable was converted to factor in the first place by read.csv(). I've written the following function for which to check the values that came in that natively fail numeric conversion:

The function finds that your numeric column of data also includes values 'a' and 'b' which are preventing numeric conversion. Let's say now you realize the issue, and are aware that 'a' and 'b' should be converted to 0. You can easily make this conversion after forcing the values to numeric-but first converting to character, as so:

Now we see the column 'a_better' seems to directly represent the original values in 'a'.

The combination of these functions make it easy to:

Avoid our initial type conversion issue.

Discover why our data that was assumed numeric is not all numeric, and DO SOMETHING about it.

TIMES I'VE ALMOST BEEN BURNT BY FACTOR CONVERSIONS

To finish this up I thought I would give two examples of times when I've almost been burnt by this functional weirdness in R.Scenario One
I was analyzing a dataset that had an interesting distribution-it was monetary data, but rounded to the nearest dollar, and involved integer values from -1 to 250-with some higher outliers. Remember that as.numeric() replaces a factor scale with an integer index starting at 1. The dataset also included some NULL values, represented by the word NULL (this is how the Python-Spark export created the data).

When I downloaded and imported the data it initially came in as factor, and (not thinking) I simply forced the type conversion. This had the effect of creating NA from the prior NULLs which I knew were assumed 0's and fixed with a simple df[is.na(df)] = 0 statement. The problem was that now my scale was shifted approximately two values higher due to the initial distribution-but the variance was still the same, the percent of 0's were reasonable, and generally the data was still reasonable.

After about an hour of working with the data, I noticed that I was a bit too far off of control totals I had run in PySpark, and backed into my problem, fixed and moved on.

This speaks to a major risk in the factor conversion problem: when the dataset is made up of integers very near zero, the error is difficult to detect.

Scenario Two
In scenario two I was dealing with geospatial data, a polygon shapefile at the zip code level (what our external vendor could handle). I had crossed it with a few massive 'points layers' and was creating an analysis of output zips using some fairly massive distance and customer travel pattern analytics. At one point I needed to link the zip codes up to some additional zip code based data, but the join failed because the zip codes were factors.

Knowing I was only dealing with zip codes in the United States, I quickly used the as.numeric() without thinking. In this case (if you know about zip codes you can imagine what happened) the new factor levels lead to effectively a scramble join. I would have missed this completely, except that my last step involved visualizing the zips in a nationwide map-which looked completely random.The point of this anecdote: as usual, visualizing data can be a powerful check against otherwise undetectable coding mistakes.

CONCLUSION

Factors in R can be a powerful statistical tool, but under a few scenarios in type conversion, they can cause issues. This blog post provided:

A general description of the issue.

A couple of methods including a function to find non-numeric values in a factor.

Saturday, February 3, 2018

Those people appear to be mainly aspiring authors and members of the anti-Trump "resistance."

When I go on Twitter, I'm often confronted with this view:

Trying to see the unavaible tweet, I click through and see this:

I am blocked by thousands of people on Twitter. When I tell people about this publicly they often react in thinking I must be the worlds most massive troll (but I'm not). But most of these "blockers" are accounts that I've never interacted with, they have essentially blocked me either categorically or because I'm part of a massive block list.

Blocking has become a major part of the user experience on Twitter for many reasons, and that's largely out of the scope of this blog. To understand how someone ends up blocked like me; you should understand two products:

Block together: A program that gives users the ability to share block lists and otherwise categorically ban accounts.

Twitter Block Chain: This chrome extension is (poorly named) used to block all users of a specific account. For instance, it could be used to block anyone who follows @realDonaldTrump

After a day when I found a couple of random accounts blocking me. I realized their was a Data Science angle, specifically:

Can I use an algorithm to scan Twitter and accounts that block me?

Can I optimize the algorithm with Machine Learning to predict accounts likely to block me and make my initial algorithm find blockers more quickly.

The answer to these questions ended up being "yes" and "yes." Here I'll describe the results, first with a description of results and then a concept of the data science method.

THE DATA: WHO BLOCKS ME

To-date, I've used an algorithm to find about 3100 people who block me on twitter. Releasing the full list would seem to be doxxing-however the public nature of which "verified" accounts block me seems less problematic. Here's a listing with evidence of some "celebrity blocks":

TL;DR version: A guy who invented the term "vice signaling," a liberal writer, another liberal writer, a standup comedian, and a former Star Trek actor.

Digging into the data around who blocks me, we can generally describe the nature of people who tend to block me by comparing how the words on their profiles compare to the words on the profiles of people who *don't* block me. Below is a list of those words and their indication of risk.

A score of 1.0 deems that this word neither increases the probability that a user will block me, a score of 2.0 is twice as likely to block, whereas a score of 0.5 is half as likely to block. There are two effective dimensions to the majority of people who block me:

People who are part of the liberal "resistance" to Donald Trump (which is a bit bizarre because I'm not a Trump supporter-though I was very anti-Bernie Sanders).

One outlier word is the term "lyme" which turned out on inspection to relate to people who believe they have "Chronic Lyme Disease," a condition covered by Evidence Based Medicine proponent Orac over on his blog.

And because I know everyone loves wordclouds (sarcasm), on a recent long social scan, I created wordclouds of people who block me. Here's what that looks like, first looking at those who block me:

And those who do not:

Apparently, unbeknownst to me, I am loved by dog/pet lovers (potentially an artifact of sampling, rescan method-but few of the dog-lover accounts blocked me).

HOW I ENDED UP BLOCKED

To begin my methodology, I started with a bit of a priori theory-specifically-what are the incidents that led to my blocking? I'm blocked by people across the political spectrum, from conservative politicians in my own state to "resistance" members that are famous nationwide.. and an odd number of science fiction writers (I'm not a fan, don't care). Here were my best theories of my own blocking:

I was added to Wil Wheaton's block list after telling him to "Shutup Wesley" one too many times.

I got into a few arguments that led to individual blocks with Bernie bros when I was pointing out some misconceptions they had about tax policy.

Wheaton's block list, as well as the block together App seemed the most likely scenario for wide-spread blocking.

HOW TO DETERMINE IN CODE THAT SOMEONE BLOCKS YOU

Figuring out that someone blocks you via the Twitter API is actually super easy. My initial scanner ran all inside of R, then I ported it to Python using the tweepy package. The basic steps:

Try to download a user timeline for your target user.

Catch all errors.

Check to see if the returned error is code 136.

Here's what that looks like in general Python:

Note: This code is simply for a single user. The entire application I wrote is a full iterative search-for-user, check block status, recursively search for more users, model, repeat application in Python with a Microsoft SQL Server backend that I am not publishing in whole at this time, for various reasons.

HOW TO CHOOSE WHICH USERS TO CHECK-AT FIRST

Knowing that our end goal here is to optimize an algorithm which will tell us which users to check for blocking, we first need to gather an informed set of accounts that will tell us which types of users block us. Using the a priori theory of why users may be blocking me, I turned to two places:

The followers of the account for the app "BlockTogether"-this may create an artificially high incidence rate-but hey at least I know they follow me.

Followers of Wil Wheaton-because I know he blocks me, and also shares his block list, so there's a fair chance that his followers would buy into this.

I used this strategy to get an initial subset of users to figure out what types of users might block me. So I started there, using the Twitter API to download all the Twitter ID's associated with Wheaton's followers (reduced Python below-I'm showing the basic blocks in segments here for ease of presentation).

MODELING MY BLOCKERS

Why would I even need to model my blockers? A few reasons:

I don't have a list of all Twitter accounts, so I need to predict who's followers might block me at high rates.

These checks rely on the Twitter API, which is rate limited, so it's of great advantage to rank-order accounts in terms of likelihood to block.

Understanding which people block me gives me insight to the 'why'?

As such I began creating a model against Twitter profile data to determine which accounts are likely to block me. First, what data elements will I have available? The basic elements available are what is pulled from a profile scan of the Twitter API:

Verified Account?

# of follows

# you follow

date created

#of favorites

#of statuses

Location

Name

Description (text description on your profile)

Most of these are fairly easy to analyze, with the exception of the text description (of course, the most rich sense of actual attitudinal data which is likely to predict who you may block). I can't push a text description directly into a ML model, so I took two strategies in creating numeric data from textual data:

Compute relative frequency between blockers and non-blockers of high incidence words, and then create binary dummies for all words with a skew (measured by binomial test) <.05

Use a type of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to compute correlated topic models accross the description data; create a variable for each observed topic, and assign the probabilistic association for each user description to fill in the data for each topic.

Data was clean at this point and essentially ready for modeling. Dependent variable was whether or not I was blocked, N was all accounts "checked" to date, independent variables are as listed above.

As expected, textual data was most predictive with several other items also providing important information to the prediction. Note: many of these variables have complex interactive effects inside our XGBTree, so it's not a simple matter of "more followers==more likely to block."

WHICH ACCOUNTS TO CHECK FIRST

What is the value of modeling this data? Because the Twitter API is rate limited I can only check a certain number of accounts per day, so it's good for me to use my rate limit wisely. By predicting which accounts are most likely to block me, I can simply prioritize those and thus increase my find rate. Using this prioritization at first increased my positive block rate by about 3x, from about 0.1% to 0.3%.

HOW TO GET TO NEW ACCOUNTS TO CHECK

Far above I covered where to start with a large number of account to check, deciding on followers of Wil Wheaton and the BlockTogether follower list. But once I've checke all of these accounts where should I go? Here I implemented two strategies:

I found a relationship between an individuals propensity to block and their followers propensity to block. A quirk of the twitter API is that while blocked from seeing a user's timeline, I can still pull all of their followers. So, I began iteratively pulling all the followers for each block I found.

I also found a releationship between the probability that you block me, and the incidence at which your followers will block. As such, I began pulling the followers for all high-probability blocking accounts(as determined by model above), regardless of whether they actually blocked me.

There's an ability to find users via Twitter API using words on their profile, because I already know which words (Lyme, Geek) are associated with blocking me, I simple search Twitter for those words.

This iterative method can lead to a biased sample effect over time-so it's important that you also include some random accounts in your sample OR some that are intentionally in large deviation to your current pull.

CONCLUSION

In the end a few points to take away:

The culture of Twitter has led to a situation where blocking is pervasive-especially for certain people who end up on block lists.

I am blocked by many people on Twitter, and by gathering data about these individuals-I can certainly create a general profile of my blockers.

Using Machine Learning, the Twitter API, Natural Language Processing, and other Data Science Technology, I can pull together a list of people who block me on Twitter.

As a personal aside, I don't care a lot that I'm blocked on Twitter, it doesn't appear to effect my user experience in a material way, as I am not blocked by any accounts I would normally follow and it's not an emotional issue for me. I do find it troubling that the pervasive use of block lists is allowing many Americans to insulate themselves from conflicting points of view, including primarily blocking people with whom they have never interacted with in the past.

Sunday, December 3, 2017

Over the past few weeks I have been heavily analyzing Twitter data: looking for methods to find mass-blocking patterns (I've tweeted on this extensively at @leviabx and may write that analysis up in the future). A few nights ago saw some users on Twitter wanting people to save tweets of Senators leading into passing of controversial tax legislation-I thought-hey that's actually super easy.

I downloaded that data and plan on making this data available here on the blog for other analysts to look at. If this is popular, I will think of posting more generated datasets to this site. I also think this could give some readers of this blog a taste of what social media data looks like, and what it's like to work with it.

METHOD

I used the Twitter API to pull down the most recent 500 tweets for each current sitting US Senator on Saturday night, December 2nd 2017. For this I used a list of Twitter handles. A couple of notes:

I found this list on the internet, and made the obvious changes, so if you find any errors please let me know.

Senators often have multiple Twitter handles, so I'm hoping I have the right one for this type of policy discussion.

If you have any issues on this blog you can either comment on this blog (open comments) or hit me up directly on Twitter at @leviabx.

DATA

The data I pulled down is a list of tweets found here. This data was pulled mid-day on December 2nd so it includes tweets from immediately after tax bill passage. A few notes on (some of) the data fields:

text: This is a cleaned version of the text from the original tweet.

original_text: this is the original text from the tweet.

created_at: the UTC timestamp of when the tweet was sent. This is a standardized time that is hours ahead of US eastern time.. impact: subtract 5 hours to get it to DC time.

emotions(anger, anticipation, positive, negative): for the user's convenience I ran this data through a sentiment algorithm (see Plutchik's 8 emotions).

tax: a TRUE/FALSE indicator of whether "tax" was mentioned in the tweet.

tl: this is a link to go look at the tweet directly in browser (just copypasta it to the browser). I wrote this piece of code 3 years ago and have no clue what I meant by "tl".

screen_name: the screen name of the senator who sent the tweet.

geo fields: There are a ton of geo location fields for Twitter data.. mostly to be ignored as it's only filled out on opt in from the user.

retweet/fav counts: number of times an individual tweet is retweed or favorited.

WordCloud of related tax related tweets from Senators during the week of tax reform.

USE CASE

Playing with this data can be interesting and somewhat fun. Here are some use cases you can do, from least to most technical:

Find your Senators and see what they Tweeted this week.

Sort the spreadsheet by "created_at" and follow the tweets by the timeline of bill passage and after bill passage time.

Find tweets you like/dislike (search, emotion, names), then use the "tl" field to go to the Tweet directly and react.

By sorting the emotion fields, find the Senators who were the most happy (trust, joy) versus least happy (anger, disgust) about the bill.

EXAMPLES

I'm not going to work on this dataset extensively, but I did pull together the happiest and angriest tweets regarding tax reform:

The TrumpTax bill is shameful on so many levels, but the parts attacking students are particularly awful. Why in the world would we raise taxes on grad students? Oh, right--billionaires need their tax cuts. Give me a break! https://t.co/6YPQXEZxYH

Friday, November 24, 2017

I have been programming in R for over a decade, and during that time, especially more recently, I have built robust pipelines to create large numbers of machine learning and statistical classification models at a time. The purpose of these pipelines are to evaluate multiple model types against a single dependent variable (usually in highly-dimensional space), quickly determine which works best, and automatically move to the next variable to be modeled. Like many data science projects the pipelines include five steps:

Data Cleaning,

Feature Selection,

Running Models,

Model Evaluation, and

Report Production (create a PDF for review by business owners, if they so choose).

I can write all five of these steps easily in R, and haven't really had problems with this type of modeling. But I also know Python, which has similar Machine Learning and analytical packages-and has been referred to as the "future of Data Science." I had used these packages before (pandas, numpy, sklearn), but I most often use Python for non-modeling tasks or to access frameworks like Spark.

Two weeks ago, on testing one of my pipelines, I had the idea to port my primary model building pipeline into Python. The reasons for this were two-fold:

To make use and test Python's different data science methods and packages

To make use of Python's flexibility as a programming language (as well as it's status as a "real" all-purpose language).

The coding was more difficult at first as I figured out some details of pandas data frames and numpy arrays. I'm mostly finished now, just now fixing small breaks I find. Generally the models created are nearly identical in quality, with Python maybe showing a slight edge. Other than that, my initial thoughts:

Versus

Categorical handling: If I have a categorical variable in an R data frame, and I want to pass that to an R model, I can pass the variable directly to an algorithm, and R efficiently creates numerical data on the fly without user intervention. Python, however, generally requires a preprocessing step to map the categorical into per-dimension binaries. There are drawbacks of both methods:

R is like an "automatic transmission," it is less work for the user and makes the data frame in memory easier to manipulate. On the other hand when using this method, some R methods force all levels of a categorical variable (minus one) into an algorithm, when sometimes optimal models would feature-select to far fewer (some models handle this, some don't).

Python is more of a "manual transmission," situation where the user has to intervene to decide on a categorical encoding strategy. (e.g. pandas.get_dummies() or sklearn.preprocessing.OneHotEncoder()). This ends in more work for the user, massive data frames, but allows for more control of feature selection (in some algorithms) at run time. (This is actually a problem I've seen in R for quite some time, and through being less-developed in this space, Python has "solved" the problem)

Different algorithms: This is generally to say that Python is not a primary language for statisticians and research data-scientists, (Python is new to the game) making Python a bit behind the curve for algorithm availability. One example of such a missing case is a shrunken centroids model which I had found useful in a few specific types of classification.

Some models run faster: When I run a model in R versus Python I get similar results within tolerance, except that the Python models tend to compile on my hardware much faster. As a test I ran XGBoost in both systems. The models were substantially similar (AUC= .713 v AUC = .716), however the Python version finished in 3 seconds versus 32 seconds R. Both were still under a minute, and this may not seem substantial, however inside of a analytics pipeline where you may be building a few thousand models, the timing difference at multiplication becomes substantial.

More consistency between models: R is a bit of the "wild west" in terms of consistency both in model parameters and model object outputs. For direct comparison of models (or to run different model types under similar parameters) one often has to rely on third-party packages like "caret" or "broom." This makes R's advantage in packages and model types less-than-ideal in that traversing those model types is not straight-forward. Generally in Python's sklearn I can count on classification packages of similar types to give me similar output objects and methods.

Some things don't work at all: I've had more issues in Python of certain functions not working *out of the box* as stated in documentation-many of these seem to be fixed in down-line bug fixes. I *think* this is likely because sklearn is still mainly a package under development.

Plotting: To be honest, I'm still figuring this one out. Matplotlib appears to be the preferred plotting strategy in Python (though there is a Python version of ggplot), but honestly rewriting all my diagnostic plotting strategies (and getting labels, titles, axis, and legends correct) has been one of the biggest pains in this entire process. It's difficult to determine whether Python is actually more difficult, or if it's just painful because I've spent several years developing my own plots in R.

Object Oriented: Python has a bit more straight-forward syntax as a programming language, and my code for the Python pipeline is more object oriented-and quite honestly-better coded than what I have in R. That said, the whitespace and syntax requirements in Python took some getting used to versus my "I do what I want" attitude of coding in R.

Overall-both platforms have advantages and disadvantages. My takeaways are this:

R is likely better (in the short-term at least) for data exploration and manual or "academic" model builds due to relative ease of coding and availability of models and methods.

Python may be better for large-scale model builds where speed and consistency between models is necessary (and also if you an adversion to hearing the term "tidy").

Sunday, September 10, 2017

Quite often, someone I know asks me a question that I don't have a great answer for:

How would I go about becoming a data scientist?

This is always a tough place to start a conversation, especially if data science is not a great fit for the individual I'm talking to, but there are generally two types of people who ask me this question:

Young professionals: I get the joy of working with quite a few interns and "first jobbers," who, BTW generally give me a reason to be hopeful about the future of America. (Ironically most of them aren't Americans, but whatever...) Most of these people are in computer science or some kind of analytical program and want to know what they should do to become a real "data scientist."

People my age: I also get this question from people in their mid-30's, many of whom have limited relevant education background. For certain mid-career professionals this could be a great option, especially if they have both computer science and math in their background, but this often isn't the case. They seem to be drawn to data science because they've seen the paycheck, or it just sounds mysterious and sexy. Often these people say "I love data, I'd be great at data science" (though this claim is somewhat dubious, and by this they often mean that they like USA Today infographics).

I'm writing this blog post as a place to point both of these groups, in order to give a fair full-breadth look at the skills that I would expect from data scientists. I break these skills down into three general areas (with some bonus at the end):

Math Skills

Computer Science Skills

Business Skills

Fictionalized Portrayal of a Data Scientist (that looks somewhat like my work setup)

MATH SKILLS

Math is the language of data science, and it's pretty difficult to make it 10 minutes in my day without some form of higher math coming into play. Point being: if you struggle and/or dislike math this isn't the career for you. And if the highest level math you've taken is college algebra, you're also in trouble. Knowledge of algebra is absolute assumption in data science, and most of the real work is done in higher-order math classes. I would consider four types requirements:

Calculus (differential + integral): I use calculus daily in my job, when calculating equilibrium, optimization points, or spot change. Three semesters of college-level calculus is a must for data scientists.

Matrix/Linear Algebra: The algorithms that we use to extract information from large data sets is written in the language of matrix and vector algebra. This is for many reasons, but it allows data scientists to write large scale computations very quickly without having to manually code 1000's of individual operations.

Differential Equations: This is an extension of calculus, but is extremely helpful in calculating complex variable interactions and change-based relationships.

Statistics: Don't just take the stats class that is offered as part of your major, which tends to be a bare-necessities look. Take something that focuses on the mathematics underlying statistics. I suggest a stats class at your university that requires calculus as prerequisite.

If this equation is intimidating to you, then data science is likely not a great option.

COMPUTER SCIENCE SKILLS

Here's the guidelines I give young data scientists: The correct level of computer science skill is such that you could get a job as a mid-level developer (or DBA) at a major company. This may seem like a weird metric, but it plays into the multi-faceted role of data scientists: we design new algorithms and process data which involves designing the programs that analyze that data. Being able to write code as dynamic programs allows for automated analysis and model builds that take minutes rather than weeks. Here are some courses/skills to pick up before becoming a data scientist:

Introduction to Programming: Simply knowing how computer programming works, the keys to functional and object-oriented programming.

Introduction to Database theory: Most of the data we access is stored or housed in some kind of database. In fact, Hadoop, is just a different type of database, but it's good to start with the basics in elementals. As part of this course, it's vital to learn the basics of SQL which is still (despite claims and attempts to the contrary) the primary language of data manipulation for business.

Python: Python is becoming the language of data science, and it is also a great utility language, which has available packages and add-ons for most computing purposes. It's good to have a utility language in your toolkit as many data wrangling and automation tasks don't exclusively require the tools of data manipulation (e.g.: audio to text conversion).

R: R is my primary computing language, though I work in Python and SQL in equal proportions these days (and sometimes SAS). R has extensive statistical and data science computing packages, so it's a great language to know. The question I get most often is: should I learn R, Python or SAS? My answer: have a functional understanding and ability to write code in all three, be highly proficient in at least one.

BUSINESS SKILLS

When asking about business skills, the question I most often receive is: Should I get an MBA? In a word, no. But it is helpful to understand business concepts and goals, especially to understand and explain concepts to coworkers fluently. You don't have to go deep into business theory, but a few helpful courses:

Accounting: Often data scientists are asked to look at accounting data in order to create financial analyses, or to merge financial data with other interesting areas of a business. Understanding the basics of the meaning of accounting data, accounting strategies, and how data is entered into financial systems can be helpful.

Marketing: Much of the use of data science over the past five years has dealt with targeted marketing both online and through other channels. Understanding the basics of targeted marketing, meaning of lift, acquisition versus retention, and the financials underlying these concepts is also helpful.

Micro-Econ: Though technically an economics class knowing the basics of micro theory allows you to analyze a business more wholly. Some relevant analyses may be demand and pricing elasticity, market saturation modeling, and consumer preference models. It also helps you with personally valuable analysis, like evaluating the viability of a start-up you might be thinking about joining.

Supply-demand relationships are relevant to many data science business applications.

OTHER

Though the above set of skills are necessities for data science, there are a few "honorable mention" classes that are helpful:

Social Sciences: When modeling aggregate consumer behavior, it's important to understand why people do the things they do. Social sciences are designed to analyze this; I recommend classes in economics, political science (political behavior or institutional classes), and behavioral psychology.

Econometrics: Econometrics is a blending of economics and statistical modeling, but the focus on time-series and panel analysis is especially helpful in solving certain business problems.

Communication: One of the most common complaints I hear about data scientists is "yeah _____'s smart, but can't talk to people." A business communication class can help rememdy this before it becomes a serious issue.

CONCLUSION

There are many options as the road to data science is not fixed. This road map gives you all the skills you will need to be a modern data scientist. People who want to become data scientists should focus on three major skillsets: math, computer science, and business. Some may notice that I omitted artificial intelligence and machine learning, but the statistics, math, and computer science courses on this list more than give one a head start on those skills.

Friday, March 17, 2017

A few weeks ago my grad school alma mater (University of Kansas (KU)) won their thirteenth consecutive Big 12 conference championship (I wasn't watching the game, I have better things to do). Much has been made on how large an outlier this streak is, if performance was random the odds would be about 1 in a trillion to win thirteen straight (not hyperbole, actual probability).

Along with this streak, there have also been some accusations that the University of Kansas receives preferential treatment in Big 12 Basketball, has an unfair home advantage, or outright cheats to win. The home-court advantage is actually staggering, as KU is 75-3 in conference home games over the past nine years, nearly a 95% win rate.

Half joking, I shot off a quick tweet commenting on both the conference win streak and the accusations. People quickly reacted, KU fans calling me names while Kansas State University fans agreeing, generally, though more willing to charge KU with cheating. The accusations and arguments raise an interesting question: Do certain teams have statistically different home-court advantages, and is the University of Kansas one of those teams?

METHODOLOGICAL PREMISE

The main issue in calculating home-win-bias is that different teams perform better or more poorly over time, and thus we can't look at simple win rates at home over a series of years. We need a robust methodology to set expectations for home win percentages, and compare that to actual performance. As such I devised a method to set expectations based on road wins, and apply that information to each team for analysis.

The underlying premise of this analysis looks at ratios of home win percent to road win percent over-time and calculates the advantage of playing at home for each team, and how it differs from other teams over multiple seasons. In detail:

The theory here is that some "home advantages" (KU, specifically) are higher than others either due to natural advantages, out-right cheating, or bush-league behaviors.

In order to disprove whether home advantages differ, we need a methodology to control for quality of team independent of home performance, and compute home performance in relation to that absolute advantage. Enter predicting home wins using road wins.

In aggregate, we would expect to be able to predict a team's home win percentage by looking at their road win percentage, as better teams should perform better in both venues. If a team has a systematic advantage on their home court, we would expect their home win percentage to over-perform the predictive model developed from road wins.

I build a predictive model to predict home wins based on road wins for a team each year. The models are developed for each Big 12 school as a hold out model, to remove each school's self-bias in the numbers. Then I predict the model using the held-out school, calculate the residuals on the hold out and move to the next school.

The residuals here represent a Wins Above Expectation metric. We can do two things with the residual data:

Calculate the mean residual and distribution over time which indicates the overall home bias of the school (which schools systematically over-perform at home)

Determine the best and worst performances at home for individual schools.

The initial models performed well, and show that road wins are fairly predictive of home wins, with a .52 R-squared value (variance accounted for) and a 0.4 elasticity in the log-log specification of the model.

INITIAL DATA

Starting with a visual inspection of the data, we can get an idea of the relationships between teams, home and away games, and seasons. First a data point, teams perform far better at home (65.6 average win % wins) than on the road (34.4 average win%) winning nearly twice as often on their home court as on the road. But let's go back to our initial question, does KU win more often than other Big 12 schools at home? The answer here is yes.

KU outperforms all schools, with the closest neighbor being Missouri (who has a limited sample as they left the conference a few years ago). We then see a cluster of schools with about 70% home win percentages, and a few bad schools at the end of the distribution (TCU, notably). This indicates that KU is an outlier in terms of home performance, but is that because KU is a much better team, or indicative of other issues?

Road % helps us answer this question, KU is the best road team in the conference, by a large margin. Kansas in fact is the only team in the conference with a winning road record over the past decade, winning close to 75% of games on the road. Even consistent KU rival and NCAA tournament qualifier Iowa State regularly wins fewer than 40% of their road games.

We know that KU wins a lot of games at home and on the road, but is there a way to determine if their home wins exceed a logical expectation? Before moving on to the modeling that can answer our question, we should prove out an underlying theory: whether road wins and home wins correlate with one another:

The chart and a basic model provide some basic answers:

Road wins are highly correlated to home wins at a correlation coefficient of .68.

Few teams (3%) finish a season with more road wins than home wins.

MODEL RESULTS

With the initial knowledge that KU performs highly both at home and on the road, we can start our model building process. If you're interested in the detailed model, look at the methodology section above.

Using the model to calculate how teams perform relative to peers in terms of home and road wins, I calculated the average home-court-boost, or the number of wins above road-based-expectations, shown below:

Oklahoma State has the largest home-court advantage in the conference, followed by Iowa State, Kansas and Oklahoma. Each of these schools receive about a full extra-win per season over expectations due to their home-court advantage. TCU has the worst home performance followed by West Viriginia, and Baylor.

A further interesting (and nerdy) way to view the data is a boxplot for each school representing the last ten years of wins-over performance. This shows that some schools like Kansas and Iowa State have fairly tight distributions representing consistent performance above road expectation. Other schools, like Kansas State and Baylor, have a wide distribution representing inconsistent home performance related to road expectations.

Using the same scoring method we can score individual year performances, and determine which teams have the best and worst home versus road years.

Most interesting here is that K-State's home-court advantage was a pretty amazing over the years 2014 - 2015. During those years, Kansas State was 15-3 at home and 3-15 on the road. At that time at least, it appears Kansas State's Octagon of Doom (I don't remember what it's really called, even though its where I received my Bachelor's degree) was a far greater advantage that KU's Allen Field House.

CONCLUSION

From the models developed we can reach several conclusions about the types of home advantages held by Big 12 teams:

The home advantage for the University of Kansas at Allen Field House is high (about +1 game a year) but in-line with several other top-tier Big 12 teams. This doesn't necessarily fit the story-line that KU cheats at home, but doesn't rule out other theories given by Kansas State fans: that KU cheats/gets unfair deferential treatment both at home AND on the road.

The top home advantages in the Big 12 are: Oklahoma State, Iowa State, Kansas and Oklahoma. In fact both Oklahoma State ("Madison Garden of the Plains" .. seriously?) and Iowa State ("Hilton Magic"...) hold moderately larger home advantages than the Kansas at Allen Field House.

The worst home advantages in the Big 12 are: TCU, West Virginia, and Baylor.

Some individual team-years show volatile performance, specifically Kansas State through 2014 - 2015.